Two Muses

Stephen Petronio Company, in a dance performance. The Joyce Theater, New York, April 18–23, 2006. The Stephen Petronio Company dances gracefully and moves with ease from one contradictory juxtaposition to the next. It is by turn classical and postmodern, stunning and grotesque, conventional and avant-garde, rebellious and mainstream. Tripping along historical lines, Petronio falls rhythm and sway to a time honored tradition of subversive expectations in dance, from the ballet, through Nijinsky, crosses over Judson-era dance, and lands squarely in our present with his contemporaries Bill T. Jones, Mark Morris, and Michael Clark. In his book, The Male Dancer, Ramsey Burt outlines this curious and tattered history. Unlike some of his generational contemporaries, Petronio's work never falls into the category of pastiche, instead relying on the grounded and workmanlike substance acquired from his longstanding interest in the technique of Trisha Brown. And like Morris, Clark, and Jones, no matter what the subject matter, it is impossible to deny the seductive effect of impeccably sinuous yet classically derived movement.

It was in works such as Trisha Brown's Set and Reset (1983) that Petronio himself (as the first male member of the Trisha Brown Company) danced a male duet. In that work (as in the earlier work of Merce Cunningham), Brown's dancers are stone-faced; passion is kept to a minimum and gender and sex distinctions are a non-issue. The men move as fluidly as the women and contact each other with intimacy and sensuality, but not sexuality.

Perhaps Brown's contemporaries Steve Paxton and David Gordon did more than she to deliberately upset the traditional norms of gender and display in male dancing. In Paxton's Flat (1964), Paxton disrobes in slow motion to a Muybridge-like display of images. When he hangs his suit jacket from clothes hangers taped across his body, it is as if to ask, "What is this all about?" Petronio and his contemporaries seized this question head on during the 80s, when they flayed open the whole stylistic legacy of dance—from Graham to Balanchine—to reconfigure gender-coded expectations for a new time. It has become normal for a male dancer to dance sensually with another man, and for female dancers likewise. Petronio and his then-partner, Michael Clark, once even engaged in sex acts during a dance performance (at the Anthony d'Offay gallery in 1989). Audiences, surprisingly, became accepting of this provocatively new gendered stance largely because of the return of choreographic heroic virtuosity and balletic line, stylistic qualities that had become obscure during Judson-era dancing. In addition, Clark and Petronio introduced a hybrid of classically inspired modern dance and the rhythms of new wave, punk and rock music—a style that has been described as "breakneck."

There was something strangely nostalgic about Petronio's new work at the Joyce. Was it the mix of aural delight and sensuous bodies intertwined? Two new works, Bud Suite and BLOOM, debuted by the Stephen Petronio Company. Mr. Petronio's musical collaborator was Rufus Wainwright, with a special appearance by the Young People's Chorus of New York City. Wainwright came to prominence during the late 90s, the gay son of the famous folksinging couple Loudon Wainwright and Kate MacGarrigle. Wainwright's music sounds contemporary, yet it looks back to opera and romantic turn-of-the century pop. Like Petronio and his relationship to Judson-era dance, Wainwright reaches beyond his predecessors to draw inspiration from a long-gone classical era. Many of his lyrics that at first seem to be romantic, even traditional, have a gender-bending twist. The vibrato and sway of Wainwright's melancholic tenor was the ideal complement to Petronio's ability to sway and riff off of a stylistic legacy that quotes Balanchine, Graham, and Brown simultaneously, yet still remains indescribably his own. A third work presented on the evening of April 20th was The Rite Part, adapted from Petronio's work of 1992, Full Half Wrong...